The Daniel M. Sachs
Class of 1960
Graduating Scholarship

A DESCRIPTION OF THE SELECTION PROCESS

Harry Lord ’60
member of the Selection Committee

March 8, 2006

Dear Phil, Phil, Dick, John, and Clif,

As Phil knows, I will not be able to join you at your
Officers' meeting and at the '60/'61 Dinner in New York Monday night.

I applaud your further considering having the Class of 1960
fully endow the Sachs Scholarship. What could be more fitting in light of our Class’
significant financial commitment to it at our 25th Reunion and Parker Harrell’s
wise decision in 1987 to provide for a check-off for the Scholarship on the
Class dues notice? As you know, the Scholars have already pledged $200,000
towards our overall $1,000,000 goal.

I thought that it would be helpful for you to have from me a
summary of a typical Sachs Scholarship selection year: I picked this one,
2005-06 - the most recent in the 37-year life of this most prestigious
Scholarship.

I leave to the very capable David Loevner '76, Susan McMurry
Archer '92, and Charles Gillispie (Hon.) '60 the from-the-heart task of
providing at your meetings, last October 5 (I was on the phone for that one)
and coming up in a few days, whatever additional background on the Scholarship
and its funding and future that you would like to hear further about.

This is my tenth year as the Class liaison to the Scholars
and the program - Rich McGlynn asked that I become involved on behalf of our
Class. In the Scholarship's first 27 years there had been no Mister
Interlocutor for the Class. So, many of us interested in the program felt a bit
in the dark.

I have done my level-best not to tamper with or inject
myself unduly into a sophisticated and collegial process that has long
sustained itself so impressively. This is a tribute to the former Scholars who
have managed the program skillfully and effectively over these many years -
and, of course, to Charles. For me this has been a most fascinating and
enriching decade, involving as does anything of value lots of hard work and
tough choices.

This year we had a banner crop of 52 applicants from the
senior class. Mind you, there is an enormous amount of self-screening here, and
the University is very much involved in counseling and steering students
seeking, or in some cases simply day-dreaming about, the most highly
competitive Scholarship and Fellowship award opportunities out there.

As you know, the era of three or four Rhodes Scholarship
awards each year to graduating Princetonians ended long ago. More Rhodes by far
are now awarded to graduates of the U.S. Military and Naval Academies than
anywhere else. Now on average, every other year one Princeton senior is awarded
a Rhodes. This year, for example, 32 were awarded to students at 22 colleges
and universities across the country - one at Princeton, none interestingly at
Harvard, M.I.T., or Columbia. The fact that Yalies just won three shows just
how bizarre the Rhodes has become. The recent history of Marshall Scholarship
awards is similar - this year, 45 awards at 35 schools, 2 fortunately at Princeton.
So, in part for this reason, competition for the Sachs Scholarship simply could
not be keener.

Candidly, not to say jingoistically, we do a better job than
do the Rhodes and the Marshall people: more focused, more probing, more
consistent.

In the first two weeks of November the screening group
(David, two other "younger" former Scholars, Professor Gillispie -
Dan's undergraduate mentor, Bill Sachs '66 - Dan's estimable brother, and I)
pored over and through the five-inch-thick stack of submitted materials. Then
we met in mid-November for the better part of five hours at the Nassau Club,
and selected the 12 to be interviewed: an hour apiece, Friday evening and all
day Saturday the first weekend in December. The interviewing group included all
of the screeners, except for Charles who believes quite incorrectly that his
involvement would be intrusive, as well as two additional former Scholars, for
a total of seven. The interviews were all conducted in West College.

To give you a glimpse into the extraordinary level of talent
of these aspirants, I noted in the press in the past two weeks that two
students whom we did not include in the dozen we interviewed were awarded a
Gates Scholarship and a Reach Out '56 Fellowship. And two students whom we did
interview were among the total of five Gates Scholars honored from Princeton
this year. A prerequisite of the Gates award, as you may know, is admission to
a particular program of choice at Cambridge University.

The 12 interviewed were as always a diverse bunch:
philosophers, a religious and ethical scholar, a constitutional interpreter, an
astrophysicist, a mediaevalist, a physicist, a classicist, and some more
mainstream economics and WWS majors. The C.V.'s, transcripts, letters of
recommendations from faculty and distinguished persons far and wide, and levels
of accomplishment across the board of these young men and women are simply
astounding.

The decision-making that Saturday night three months ago at
David and Cathy's house in Princeton took another five hours, as it always
does. Because our '05 Scholar Kyle Jaros, whom I trust you met in NYC a year
ago or at our 45th's Sunday breakfast, chose to pursue his field of scholarship
in Hang Zhou and in Nanjing, many of us had hoped that the most-qualified
applicant this year would choose, as most do, to study at Worcester College,
Oxford, the Sachs "center" since well before the Scholarship's first
award in 1970 - and its spiritual home.

We selected the stunning Dan-el Padilla Peralta '06 as this
year's Sachs Scholar. Dan-el is a brilliant Classics major, who will receive as
well of all things a Certificate in the Woodrow Wilson School. I believe that
he is now busy writing two theses. Ask him about that at the Dinner on Monday.
I do know that he won Freshman First Honor Prize and a string of other
glitters, including best Junior-year independent work in the WWS, and that he
added German as a language last summer at Middlebury. His personal story is
almost beyond our comprehension.

Dan-el will study at Oxford for two years for a second B.A.
in Literae Humaniores, or "Greats." Look for Dan-el to be President
of say Stanford one day. After all, Anne-Marie Slaughter '80 and Elena Kagan
'81, two of Dan-el's predecessors, are the Deans of the Woodrow Wilson School,
now celebrating its 75th year, and of the Harvard Law School. I would say that
anything is possible.

A picture being worth a thousand words, I am about to stop
this narrative.

So that is the process, and these are just a couple of the amazing
students/human beings who come forward each year to seek our Scholarship. The
Class of 1960 has every reason to take great pride in what it set into motion
the better part of 40 years ago, shortly after Dan's shocking death - and has
husbanded and perpetuated ever since.

Let me know if you would like to know anything further from
me. Better yet, you will have two experts at your meeting and at least two more
former Scholars plus Dan-el, Bill Sachs and his wife Iliana, and perhaps Dan's
widow Joan at the Dinner following it.

Ask any of them anything: they like nothing better than
talking about all of this - for reasons I think that are self-evident. It is,
after all, an infectious subject.

I hope that your meeting goes swimmingly. And thank you for
inviting me once again.

My very best regards to all of you. Clif, please tell
Carolyn that I was delighted to have a chance to chat with you and her on
McCosh Walk Alumni Day. And Phil D., in light of our forced march up Mt. Princeton
in CO ten years ago, you would have loved our long and demanding Kawa Karpo
trek in Tibet last June.

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